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Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam

No Peace, No Honor

Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam

In 1973, Henry Kissinger shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the secret negotiations that led to the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam. Nixon famously declared the 1973 agreement to be "peace with honor"; America was disengaging, yet South Vietnam still stood to fight its own war. Kissinger promptly moved to seal up his personal records of the negotiations, arguing that they are private, not government, records, and that he will only allow them to be unsealed after his death. No Peace, No Honor deploys extraordinary documentary bombshells, including a complete North Vietnamese account of the secret talks, to blow the lid off the true story of the peace process. Neither Nixon and Kissinger's critics, nor their defenders, have guessed at the full truth: the entire peace negotiation was a sham. Nixon did not plan to exit Vietnam, but he knew that in order to continue bombing without a congressional cutoff, he would need a fig leaf. Kissinger negotiated a deal that he and Nixon expected the North to violate. Ironically, their long-maintained spin on what happened next is partially true: only Watergate stopped America from sending the bombers back in. This revelatory book has many other surprises. Berman produces new evidence that finally proves a long-suspected connection between candidate Nixon in 1968 and the South Vietnamese government. He tells the full story of Operation Duck Hook, a large-scale offensive planned by Nixon as early as 1969 that would have widened the war even to the point of bombing civilian food supplies. He reveals transcripts of candidate George McGovern's attempts to negotiate his own October surprise for 1972, and a seriocomic plan by the CIA to overthrow South Vietnam's President Thieu even as late as 1975. Throughout, with page-turning dialogue provided by official transcriptions and notes, Berman reveals the step-by-step betrayal of South Vietnam that started with a short-circuited negotiations loop, and ended with double-talk, false promises, and outright abandonment. Berman draws on hundreds of declassified documents, including the notes of Kissinger's aides, phone taps of the Nixon campaign in 1968, and McGovern's own transcripts of his negotiations with North Vietnam. He has been able to double- and triple-check North Vietnamese accounts against American notes of meetings, as well as previously released bits of the record. He has interviewed many key players, including high-level South Vietnamese officials. This definitive account forever and completely rewrites the final chapter of the Vietnam war. Henry Kissinger's Nobel Prize was won at the cost of America's honor.

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Praise

Daniel Ellsberg At last, a book that does for the Nixon era in Vietnam what the Pentagon Papers did for those of his predecessors. It reveals a hitherto-undocumented and still largely unknown policy: Nixon and Kissinger relied on secret threats of escalation in order to prolong the war indefinitely, at acceptable cost. I've spent many years studying and obsessing about what these two were up to -- just why they added over twenty-thousand names to the Vietnam Memorial, while killing hundreds of thousands of humans in Indochina -- and this book finally answers most of my questions. I learned something new from every chapter. It's a marvelous piece of work.

Daniel Ellsberg At last, a book that does for the Nixon era in Vietnam what the Pentagon Papers did for those of his predecessors. It reveals a hitherto-undocumented and still largely unknown policy: Nixon and Kissinger relied on secret threats of escalation in order to prolong the war indefinitely, at acceptable cost. I've spent many years studying and obsessing about what these two were up to -- just why they added over twenty-thousand names to the Vietnam Memorial, while killing hundreds of thousands of humans in Indochina -- and this book finally answers most of my questions. I learned something new from every chapter. It's a marvelous piece of work.

Seymour M. Hersh author of My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath This is a study of betrayal -- betrayal of a military ally, of a negotiating partner, of the truth, of the public interest, and of the underlying principles of our democracy. It's a story that needed to be told.

Hoang Duc Nha former South Vietnam Minister of Information and Chief Aide to President Thieu during the peace negotiations Professor Berman highlights the duplicity the South Vietnamese side had to deal with, not only from the Communist side but tragically also from their U.S. allies. This is a "must read" book. The real participants in those peace negotiations could not have written any better.

Stanley Karnow Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Vietnam: A History In his carefully researched, authoritative, and highly readable book, Larry Berman unravels for the first time the tawdry endgame in Vietnam. It might be said of Nixon and Kissinger, as Tacitus said of the Peloponnesian War: "They made a wasteland and called it peace."

H. R. McMaster author of Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam Based on newly available evidence, Larry Berman's No Peace, No Honor sheds new light on the disappointing end of America's tragic war in Vietnam. Berman demonstrates that America's war in Vietnam ended under Richard Nixon much as it began under Lyndon Johnson -- amidst a surprising degree of dishonesty. Berman reveals Nixon's and Kissinger's willingness to compromise principle for expediency and national interests for personal political fortune. The losers were the South Vietnamese people and those Americans who made extraordinary sacrifices to preserve their freedom.

Marvin Kalb Executive Director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and author of The Media and Foreign Policy The Vietnam War continues in Larry Berman's blistering critique of Nixon/Kissinger policy. Berman has plowed through new documentation and unearthed new revelations. Agree or disagree with his conclusions, Berman has much to say, and he says it with clarity, force, and fearlessness.

Mark Clodfelter National Defense University No Peace, No Honor is the most complete analysis of the Nixon era of the Vietnam War yet written. Larry Berman shows in devastating detail that the peace crafted by Nixon and Kissinger in January 1973 was anything but an "honorable" accord. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand what really occurred during America's conduct of the Vietnam War.

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